ABSTRACT
The Joliet urbanized area is not moving closer to Chicago; it is running away pell-mell. This is fully in line with one of the continuing aims of Joliet as a civil community, namely to maintain its separate identity and particularly its separation from Chicago, the giant to the northeast. Of course the city of Joliet was but one civil entity in the civil community and, for that matter, the one least eligible for federal funds before the introduction of general revenue sharing. Political systems often are thought of as steering a course of government activity much as a ship steers across the seas from port to port. While the planners’ proposals have not always been accepted by the community, their track record, so to speak, seems relatively good. The Joliet experience suggests several distinct conclusions about the functioning of the medium-sized civil community generally and about the forces of growth versus nongrowth in civil communities of this scale.
